History repeating itself?
The following is taken from a work written earlier this century describing how the great Presbyterian Church in the USA, the denomination of stalwarts such as Dr J Gresham Machen, declined in the 1920s and '30s. Sad to say it has a familiar sound to us today.
If, to you, the big thing is the Work of the Church Through Official Agencies, individuals and their rights will matter comparatively little. Doctrine will matter little. You are for the organisation no matter what it preaches. You will be concerned with individuals mainly as actual or potential sources of contributions, and you will feel that you have a vested right to these contributions a right that can be enforced by the big stick of ecclesiastical action, ready to hand. You will feel that anyone who refuses to give, or persuades others to refuse to give, to these agencies, even upon the plea that they are disloyal to the faith they are alone created to preach, is a rebel who is disrupting the very functioning of the church. You feel that all giving should be exercised through the official agencies. You therefore penalise those who will not so give, or who advise others not so to give. Religious activities must be expressed in official terms.
Once begun, this process is difficult to stop. To claims of individual freedom, to quotations from the constitution of the church or the Bible guaranteeing such liberties, you turn a very deaf ear. People who insist upon sound doctrine will, in your estimation, be only dangerous cranks. You simply state that the welfare of the whole church must come first, and that if any persons do not like it they can get out. Then when they do get out after carrying their cases as far as they can in church courts, you say they can't get out and 'suspend' or 'depose' them for contumacy. You have arrived at the totalitarian church!
That is the point to which the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. came in June, 1936.
(An excerpt from "The Case for Compromise" by H. McAllister Griffiths, pp.14-15)
Any comments or questions please E-Mail me or Rev William Macleod the editor.
[Back to Reformed Christian Pages][Back to Free Church Foundations]
[Back to Commission of Assembly Issue]